Any hard data for high bitrate fetish?
Reply #13 – 2009-04-02 15:28:38
... There are real life samples which make a subtle though audible difference. ... Which would that be for LAME? Let me start with that sample which made me conscious of potentially restricted mp3 quality though it did not come from real life. That was 'trumpet' which I ran upon when I came to HA during the alpha development phase of Lame 3.97 when I did listening tests as did so many HA members. It was so easily abxable at -V0 that I was shocked and it was not one of those pre-echo samples prone to mp3 restrictions. The problem was not improved substantially with 3.97 final, and it was there with previous Lame versions. The problem was increased by using VBR - with very high bitrate ABR or CBR the results were at least a lot better. 3.98 improved significantly on trumpet and other non-pre-echo problems like those of the 'sandpaper noise' kind, or the musically very simple track 'herding_calls'. 3.98 also improved on pre-echo samples like the terrific problem sample 'eig' (aka 'Abfahrt Hinwihl') which BTW maybe one of the easiest sample to be ABXed when using -V0 (or any other very high bitrate setting of any mp3 encoder - Lame 3.98 even does a better job than many other encoders). I'm into non-pre-echo problems because I'm not sensitive to pre-echo. Harpsichord music provides special problems to mp3 even at highest bitrate. Anyway Lame 3.98.2 is doing fine, and -V1.5 yields non-annoying errors to me in case it's not transparent. -V0 does a better job on the problems mentioned though isn't totally transparent in any case. Unfortunately it's also about problems that did arise in my real world encodings. My personal specific experience of subtle (!) Lame errors even at -V0 was with french woman singers. I was able to abx it and a sample I published was confirmed by AlexB. It was 'Là Où Je Suis Née' from Camille's album 'Le sac des filles'. The problems are very subtle though with -V0 and also -V1.5, and I simply encode emotionally important music with lossyWAV or Lame -V0, and the vast majority of music with Lame -V1.5. If I weren't short on storage space with my new DAP I'd use -V0 throughout when not using lossyWAV. It's just a little bit more care-free, and takes 227 kbps on average for typical music of mine when using a 17.5 kHz lowpass. Not extremely much IMO. BTW I was one of those who gave a '0' problems to the AAC encoders. I don't have real experience with them but was obliged to do a choice.